More than one in ten crashes involves buses in Sheffield

BUS crashes made up 12 per cent of all road collisions in Sheffield over a 10-year period, new figures reveal.

There were 2,703 collisions involving a bus in the city between 2000 and 2009 – even though buses account for only three per cent of traffic.

Bus passengers also made up 24 per cent of all passenger casualties.

In total 86 per cent of collisions took place between 8am and 6pm on a weekday, peaking between 3pm and 4pm. There are more than average on a Friday.

The figures were in a Sheffield Council report published on the new Road Safety Observatory website.

Kevin Clinton, head of road safety at RoSPA, said: the website was ‘an important step in making road safety evidence more accessible’.

The Department for Transport has produced two web-based tools to try to improve road safety.

One is The Road Safety Comparison Site, which holds road safety performance data for local highways authorities and puts collision and casualty data into context.

Sheffield is shown to have had 1,529 collisions causing slight injuries in 2011 – down from 2,124 in 2005.

Fatal crashes dropped from 12 to nine in the same time period.

An accident map showed many collisions occurred in and around the city centre, although there were also seven in Hillsborough, eight around the Northern General Hospital and four on Meadowhead roundabout in 2011 – the most recent year information is available for.

In Rotherham there were 1,109 collisions with slight injuries in 2005, decreasing to 955 in 2011. There were four fatal collisions, down from eight.

Fatal collisions in Barnsley dropped from 17 to 8 and those with slight injuries from 931 to 701.